Bison Burgers, for Humanity's Sake

THREE years ago, Ted Turner's effort to restore the country's bison herds was such a success that it created a problem: a glut of bison meat. So Mr. Turner has started a restaurant chain, Ted's Montana Grill, where he is turning bison into burgers and, in the process, hoping to build what he calls ''another great fortune.''

With little fanfare, Mr. Turner opened the first of the restaurants in 2002 and now has 11 of them in the South and West, five in this city alone. But as everyone knows, Mr. Turner thinks big. So it should come as no surprise that he has ambitious plans for what started as a simple experiment to see if he could create an appetite for bison.

''I can see a day when this company has 500 restaurants and a billion-dollar market cap,'' he said over lunch at the grill that he recently opened in the lobby of his Atlanta office building. ''Isn't it great?'' he half-asked, half-stated, of the spanking new addition, which was fairly bustling on a recent weekday.

Wearing a dark suit and a tie adorned with -- what else? -- bison images, Mr. Turner, 64, was promoting the concept with the same touch of hucksterism that he once used to convert skeptics who did not see the potential of CNN, the 24-hour news network he founded.

Whether restaurants that serve bison burgers will ever be as successful as CNN is not clear. But for Mr. Turner, a new fortune would come in handy. He has lost billions by stubbornly holding his AOL Time Warner stock, the bulk of which he received when he sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner in 1996 and endorsed Time Warner's merger with America Online four years later.

At its height, his stake in the media giant was worth nearly $9 billion. But then the stock market plummeted, sending AOL Time Warner's shares tumbling. Next came several controversies, including questions raised over whether the company's earnings might have benefited from questionable accounting. Since the AOL Time Warner merger was announced in January 2000, the stock has fallen 78.8 percent.

Exasperated with AOL Time Warner's management and infuriated that it had ignored him, Mr. Turner resigned as vice chairman early this year, although he remains on the board of the company, which is changing its name to just Time Warner. He also plans to make his presence known by opening a Ted's Montana Grill two blocks from the new corporate headquarters on Columbus Circle in Manhattan.

The stock's decline has been especially hard for Mr. Turner because of his enormous philanthropic commitments. He is now worth about $2.3 billion. His remaining 40 million shares of Time Warner are valued at $600 million, and he has roughly $700 million in land and bison. An additional $800 million is in bonds and other liquid investments. But that includes roughly $550 million he has promised the United Nations as part of his groundbreaking $1 billion pledge in 1997. ''That's not my money,'' he said in an interview.

While several philanthropists have given away a total of $1 billion or more, Mr. Turner and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and benefactor of the world's largest foundation, are the only two people known to have pledged single grants that big. Mr. Gates's fortune has held up pretty well since the economy and the stock market went on the defensive three years ago, but Mr. Turner and legions of other philanthropists have seen their fortunes shrivel.

Anecdotal reports from charities and fund-raisers suggest that deadlines for many big pledges have been extended and some donations canceled as a result. But Mr. Turner is determined to fulfill his pledge to the United Nations. So long as Time Warner stock continues to trade around its current value -- $15.39 -- he will be able to fulfill his promise. If the stock were to plunge, Mr. Turner would still give away the same number of shares he initially promised, though the total gift would be worth less than $1 billion.

But Taylor Glover, Mr. Turner's chief financial adviser, said he was constantly evaluating strategies to ensure that Mr. Turner meets his goal. ''You either give money or you don't,'' Mr. Glover said Mr. Turner once told him. ''You don't give it and try and take it back.''

TODAY, Mr. Turner is clearly sobered by the saga of his fortunes. ''I was just getting cranking,'' he said of his grand philanthropic gestures, though he is also realistic. ''I don't want to be broke in my old age.''

That's hardly likely. In fact, his Time Warner stock has rebounded from its lows, the value of his 1.8 million acres of ranch land is rising and the price of bison has improved slightly.

But even billionaires can benefit from fiscal discipline. Mr. Glover is working on a program that will make Mr. Turner's 14 ranches self-sustaining and even profitable. The 600,000-acre Vermejo Park Ranch in New Mexico and Colorado, for example, now generates about $6.5 million a year from hunting and fishing fees, more than covering its costs.

Mr. Turner has also gotten a break from the board of the United Nations Foundation, the vehicle that funnels his money to various United Nations projects. It stretched his payments out five years beyond the original 10-year timetable.

If the world is still amazed at the size of that gift, Mr. Turner says he does not understand why. To him, it was a logical progression for a philanthropist. In the early days, ''like everybody else I gave away the 5 percent of the foundation's value that the law required,'' Mr. Turner said. ''Then I realized you can give away everything if you want to.''

Why the United Nations? Mr. Turner said he had been fascinated by it since childhood. ''I remember watching Nikita Khrushchev bang his shoe on the podium at the U.N. and thinking it was a place to blow off steam,'' he said, referring to an incident in the 1950's when a speech by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain sent Khrushchev into a rage. ''I figure when they are screaming and hollering at each other, they are not throwing bombs.''

''I like gallantry, and the U.N. was an idealistic thing,'' Mr. Turner said. ''I was inspired by things like the Round Table and King Arthur. '' But even Mr. Turner's advisers were stunned by the plan he formulated roughly 48 hours before he was to receive an award from the United Nations Association of the United States of America.

''I was worried, I had nothing to say and I was getting this big award in front of all these people,'' Mr. Turner recalled. ''So I was thinking what could I talk about when I started to think, well, I'll buy the U.S. debt to the U.N., at a discount, maybe, like a repo man.''

AT the time, Congress had withheld roughly $1 billion in dues that the United States owed to the United Nations. ''Imagine, the U.N.'s biggest member was a deadbeat,'' Mr. Turner said. ''If you go to a country club, your name is posted if you don't pay.''

Mr. Turner learned quickly that an individual cannot simply give money to the United Nations, so his advisers created the United Nations Foundation as the conduit for his money. The United Nations Fund for International Partnerships serves as a liaison office between the United Nations and the foundation, suggesting projects for it to finance.

Although his overall pledge generated big headlines, the grants that his foundation makes are generally for small, innovative programs that would not otherwise receive financial support from the United States. One of his projects is the Equator Initiative, a package of programs aimed at reducing poverty and preserving the vast biological and ecological wealth in the countries around the Equator. Local nonprofit organizations and communities submit their programs for consideration, and the United Nations Foundation, with the United Nations, selects the best. Last year, seven prizes of $30,000 each were awarded and additional grants were made later to help spread word of practical solutions, build business and financial expertise among local small businesses and create an educational campaign.

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Mr. Turner said he now spends about 50 percent of his ''thinking time'' on philanthropy. But as much as he loves the spotlight, he runs his foundation the way he always ran his businesses: he is hands off on day-to-day issues. He describes his role as ''a banana, just one of the bunch.''

But $1 billion makes for a big banana, and he periodically exercises his power. For instance, the United Nations Development Program submitted a proposal that the foundation help underwrite a project to prod the Angolan government to spend more of its oil income on social welfare. ChevronTexaco, the oil giant, would have been a partner in the project.

The foundation's staff and the United Nations advisory board that vets proposals liked the idea, but Mr. Turner opposed it. During a dinner with the foundation's executive committee, Mark Malloch Brown, the administrator of the United Nations Development Fund, presented the plan. ''To the audience of one, it bombed completely,'' Mr. Malloch Brown said. ''The snag in the carpet was that we forgot that Ted hates oil companies because of his absolute environment commitments.''

How does the United Nations feel about Mr. Turner today? Mr. Malloch Brown recalled a lunch to honor Mr. Turner on the fifth anniversary of his gift. ''The room was mesmerized,'' he said. ''Ted is outspoken, vulgar, strategic and big. They are tactical, small and buttoned down. The community is mesmerized and seduced by him. Of course, they think individual ideas are a bit wacky. But he is a wild force of nature at a polite tea party.''

Mr. Turner is also proud of the leverage that his gift has had in opening other coffers to the United Nations.

''The greatest thing about the Turner gift was that it built a network for us,'' said Amir A. Dossal, executive director of the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships. ''Many of the organizations like Gates and the World Bank that came to us through the United Nations Foundation now also become our partners independently.''

Whether Mr. Turner can live up to his commitments to two other foundations is far less certain. In 2001, he pledged shares worth $250 million to his Nuclear Threat Initiative, aimed at deterring nuclear proliferation. But by the time the organization needed his money, AOL Time Warner stock had started its tailspin.

Mr. Turner has never handed the shares he has pledged to underwrite his philanthropy to the beneficiaries, preferring to preserve the potential upside to finance future charitable endeavors.

But this year, he gave the Nuclear Threat Initiative the rest of the shares he had promised so it could sell them, preventing further losses and locking in $70 million. His family foundation, which is dedicated to conservation and environmental causes, suffered a similar fate.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative then became a public charity, letting it accept donations from others. Warren E. Buffett, who has long said his big philanthropic gestures will begin only after he dies, celebrated the occasion with gifts totaling $15 million.

''You have to get oil out of the ground a little bit at a time,'' Mr. Turner deadpanned about Mr. Buffett's philanthropic track record.

The United Nations Foundation was set up as a public charity from the beginning and has raised $175 million from other donors, adding to the $449 million of Mr. Turner's money it has spent.

But Mr. Turner says the world is in imminent crisis and wants to save it; the Turner Foundation hands out ''Save the Humans'' bumper stickers. So he is working to build another fortune with his restaurant chain.

The grills are decorated with reproductions of Western paintings and photographs that hang in his ranch house, and the cuisine is derived from recipes handed over by his ranch cook.

As he does with CNN, he likes to think that the quality of his product is superior. ''These fries are hand cut every morning,'' he said, urging visitors to try a few.

In keeping with his desire to protect the environment, napkins are fabric dish towels, not paper. But the straws are paper. ''Do you know how hard it is to recycle a plastic straw?'' he asked.

He has poured about $30 million into the chain, and he makes a personal appearance at each restaurant opening, greeting customers at the door with a hearty handshake and a ''Hi, I'm Ted,'' much as he used to glad hand at cable conventions.

Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant, said, ''The restaurants have a better-than-average chance because showmanship is critical to the restaurant business, and Ted's got it.'' Still, Mr. Wolf added, ''bison is a bit too exotic and not ingrained enough in the culture to make it evident it could be a mainstream chain.''

But Mr. Turner, ever the optimist, is certain the restaurants will work. And they fill a void that was left as his role in the cable business diminished. For years, he would show up at cable conventions and remind executives, ''I was cable when cable wasn't cool.''

Now he is on stage again, albeit a smaller one. ''Got to play to a new audience, you know,'' he said.